I’ve had an awareness about my participation in gratitudes for some time now: I tend not to share everything I want to.

Here are a few reasons why I think that has happened:

• I take my turn as late as possible so I can think of the most things to share.
• Because I wait to share things, I often forget them before taking my turn.
• I often take too long before I’m ready and then the meeting ends before I share.

I see these solutions:

• Allow taking multiple turns.
• Allow a long chance for people who haven’t shared yet to do so before adjourning the meeting.

Yesterday I held a special gratitudes where we implemented this. I’d like to tell you about how I made that happen and what emerged.

I set the board to jump-in and declared that I would wait a while after nobody shared before adjourning.

This worked really well for me! 🙂 I had a lot of fun and I felt really satisfied and fulfilled. One of the funny things to me was that we had a habit of using terminating language (e.g. “that’s all”) after our shares.

I’d love to see more gratitudes that are run in this way or similar. I think this configuration does a really good job of making sharing inviting and of making the space feel good. I am open to some variety, and I get enough variety from what people share that I don’t want variety in how people share.